Dana Stevens

The animating humanism of Scott’s film is irreducible. It’s a wry tribute to the qualities that got our species into space in the first place: our resourcefulness, our curiosity and our outsized, ridiculous, beautiful brains.

A House of Dynamite...is a feel-bad movie, but a precise and well-constructed one, with a capable and charismatic ensemble cast that delivers the script’s grim message with many not-unpleasurable jolts of adrenaline.

A tight, fascinating chronicle of arrogance and greed.

An exemplary work of cinéma vérité that allows its subjects to speak for themselves, traffics neither in pity nor in political grandstanding.

Certainly the most genteel film Cronenberg has ever made, with period costumes worthy of Merchant/Ivory, no gore, and very little physical violence. But A Dangerous Method doesn't feel like a wimp-out or a sell-out at all. It's a fiercely thoughtful film, a movie of ideas that understands how powerful ideas can be.

Like Someone in Love is a movie that never quite lets you through to the other side of the glass, but it’s dazzling to watch whatever drifts by on the surface.

Even if you’re not transported by every minute of the film’s story, though, del Toro creates such a sumptuous visual world that it’s impossible to take your eyes off the screen.

This is the kind of movie that often racks up more than a few walkouts but also makes for passionate postscreening conversations.

The story, to the extent that it is comprehensible, is pretentious and banal, closer to "Vanilla Sky" than "Notorious." But Mr. De Palma proves that, in the absence of insight or ideas, some amazing things are possible. It is possible, for instance, to be entranced by a movie without believing it for a second.

Strange, intense and moving -- one of the few truly grown-up movies you're likely to see this year.

Part road movie, part coming-of-age story, and part noir police procedural, the quietly confident Fancy Dance marks the feature debut of Erica Tremblay, a documentary filmmaker who also wrote and directed episodes of the FX series Reservation Dogs.

1917 doesn’t solve the problem that was posed 100 years ago by the historical convergence of modern warfare and modern image-making technology. No movie can provide a final answer to the question of what it means to film a war. But Mendes’ stunningly crafted entry in the genre will now become a part of a long history of imperfect representations of that unrepresentable conflict.

Like a film noir siren Gone Girl is beautiful, sexy, and fascinatingly mean — a nasty but estimable piece of work.

Hathaway transcends her usual complacency in this role and resists the temptation of using Kym's (and her own) wounded-bird appeal to let the character off the hook.

For the most part, it works beautifully as a movie without sacrificing the integrity of the opera.

If it lacks the narrative compression and nonstop forward motion of Fury Road, Furiosa never skimps on the other main features one comes to a Mad Max movie for: deranged production design and thrilling action.

Rather than a birds’-eye procedural about a complex international mission, it’s a close-up of that mission from the point of view of the participant who understands it the least.

The film's best moments are the quiet ones in which Oldman's ironically named Smiley provides the story with its wise, unsmiling soul.

This film may disappoint some dogmatic Old Hogwartsians: a few plot points have been sacrificed, and Mr. Cuarón does not seem to care much for Quidditch. But it more than compensates for these lapses with its emotional force and visual panache.

The Bourne Identity, like its hero, triumphs through sheer unreflective professionalism. It is, by today's standards, a modest thriller, with a self-contained storyline and with very few big special effects.

A wonderful movie, observant and hilarious and full of sad and beautiful truths.

A very funny movie, alive with a sense of absurdity and human foible.

What distinguishes the film from its many peers is the quality of Ms. Collyer’s writing -- which rarely reaches for obvious, melodramatic beats -- and the precision of Ms. Gyllenhaal’s performance. She treats the character neither as a case study nor as an opportunity to show off her range, but rather as a completely ordinary and therefore arrestingly complicated person.

The two storylines interweave seamlessly and subtly, the couple's real-life problems not so much repeating as refracting the experiences of their fictional counterparts.

Mr. Lou synthesizes a wide range of styles and influences - from "Casablanca" to Wong Kar-wai - resulting in a movie that, for all its haunting strangeness, seems curiously familiar.

The resulting film is moving, charming and sad, a tribute to Ms. Briski's indomitability and to the irrepressible creative spirits of the children themselves.

Wonderstruck strikes a curious emotional tone, alternating between suspense and quiet wistfulness, with sudden surges of operatic intensity as the two timelines begin to connect. Still, all the moods hang together like the movements of a piece of classical music expressing different tempos: allegro, adagio, andante.

Del Toro has made a version of the story that’s indelible, but not definitive.